Grace Kwan on Orca, a DEX built on Solana

0:01i'm ashton addison from block west capital for investmentpitch media and today on the Crypto Coin Show we have grace kwan co-founder at orca grace welcome to the show and thank you for taking the time ashton thanks so much for having me today you're very welcome let's dive straight into the world of d5 orca is building some technology that i'm personally

0:22quite interested in let's just kick off the conversation with just a little bit on what you and your team have been working on at orca some of those solutions and then we'll dive into everything for sure yeah so if you're not actually familiar with orca we are one of the leading dexes on solana and we have a strong focus on user friendliness and

0:45simplicity okay sounds great and yeah i definitely i'm liking the transition from all these centralized exchanges towards more decentralized and i'm not as familiar with the decentralized exchanges on the solana ecosystem you know everyone sort of knows uniswop by now and i've heard of a few but i'd love to hear you know the story on how you

1:13you know just were in the blockchain industry and sort of led to starting orca and the need for a dex in the solana ecosystem for sure so it's actually funny you mentioned uniswap you know some people call us the uniswap of solana which is something we take as a compliment because we really admire unit swap as a pioneer in the space but actually though the way orca started

1:36was really organic like i literally moved into a share house which is like a co-living space in tokyo and across the hall from me was my co-founder and i've been working as an engineer and in design for the past several years nothing to do with crypto but my co-founder utaro was actually working at the ethereum foundation at the time and so there was sort of just

1:59natural synergy where he was really eager to build something that could scale to thousands or millions of users and i was eager to build something that could do so in an incredibly user-friendly and simple way compared to what existed in crypto and obviously that scale and focus on actually delivering to everyday users is something that solana is uniquely good

2:22at so that's kind of how we came to build an amm on solana since it also deeply simplifies the training experience that's a great story grayson like a match made in heaven just moving in beside the ethereum foundation coders to now working on you know one of the most innovative technologies in the space so very cool i love it and i like that you mentioned a couple times there

2:47about focusing on usability you know getting the next millions of people in to using decentralized exchanges which you know there's a little bit more responsibility for the users to take control of their own funds and make sure that they're trading their assets in a proper way and having a user interface i think is super important because i used

3:11some of the first decentralized exchanges you know over five years ago and everyone knows that the user interfaces were just crap and you could easily lose money by doing something wrong and i think it's come a long way since then now with that said you know how long has orca been been actually live and running so we launched in february of 2021 so

3:38our little baby whale is a slightly grown up whale now i guess as we like to say it's been a year and a few months but honestly it's been incredible to see how how quickly it's evolved in that time so i think even though it's only been a year you know orcas often and almost always in the top 10 indexes by trading volume these days so it's both long and

3:59short amazing and you know with decentralized exchanges often there's no limits on people can just put assets on there is that the same with orca where it's fully decentralized and anybody can just add a token address or are you mainly seeing you know the top salona assets being traded on orca so

4:25i would say that we definitely do see mainly the top assets being traded like seoul usdc is by far the biggest pool by by volume that said we actually are working on implementing what we call community listings which i like to think is a friendlier way to say what a lot of people call permissionless listings so that anyone will be able to list

4:48any token and that orca can equally support the long tail of tokens and i just finished designing that recently so really excited to bring it to fruition that is exciting and yeah i like that approach with community listings and you know you don't want you it's a fun it's a balance between having a filter of people listing you know something that's really garbage or

5:09like scam-like and having a quality filter you know because when it is a decentralized exchange often people can take advantage of that and start listing things that don't have the best reputation yeah that was a huge priority for us when thinking through what the community listings experience should look like and so safe to say we do have a plan in

5:30place that it's really like a ui level adjustment in terms of how i'm initially thinking about it but these small ui indicators can make it much clearer to people which token is likely the one that they're actually intending to trade and which ones might be one that's trying to masquerade as a token that they're trying to trade so i think it's those little attention

5:51to detail that can make something that's fundamentally the same technically be a completely different user experience definitely and i feel like a lot of people really like uniswap as a decentralized exchange on ethereum for the user experience being that it's so simple you know it's it's a very very simple ui with just like a few buttons in the middle

6:15but that also sort of limits the functionality as well now you can't do limit orders and sort of advanced order books or anything like that where are you funding the balance of functionality and usability with orca does also similar to uniswap aimed to be really a primitive and a liquidity layer for the wider solana ecosystem so in that sense we are not trying to build

6:40out all of the possible functionality right now you know we do have a fairly lean team and while it is possible of course to do limit orders on a concentrated liquidity amm it's not something that we're currently focusing on as like a first class ui level addition that said we're already through our brand new builders program in which we're giving grants to folks

7:02Of up to 200 000 orca to build protocols seeing a lot of people starting to already build lots of these more composed or some people would say d5 2.0 type protocols on top of orca that said we have added certain features to our interface which our users do really love for example you'll see that our liquidity provision flow if you actually try out whirlpools our

7:26concentrated liquidity pools are a bit more step-by-step they provide more information about the actual like apr you'll receive for example and so we do try to keep to being a fairly pure primitive but make it the best possible primitive in terms of both our smart contracts our sdk and then of course the ui that's great to hear grayson yeah i think making it more understandable for people

7:52to be able to not just trade but also add liquidity i feel like there's millions of people in crypto that you know they if they haven't tried a dex or maybe they've tried it once they're still scared of like you know adding liquidity using multiple tokens trying to figure out what their their apy might be but also if there's going to be in permanent loss and

8:17what are the risks involved in putting liquidity into a dex yeah you know i gotta be honest with you ashton they should be scared because there are real risks associated and this isn't something that anyone should just come and toss their life savings into right i think concentrated liquidity provision in particular is an art and the people who who get the highest

8:42returns are likely people who are spending a lot of time on analysis who deeply understand market trends and so i think what will you know this is my personal opinion in terms of what will likely happen but to some degree like the market making process will still be more democratized than it was in the past in trout phi in the sense that anybody can come and be a liquidity

9:03provider and in the sense that there will likely be these vaults or composed protocols built on top of primitives such as orca which allow the everyday user to participate in some of the upside of market making but ultimately it will still be a competitive exercise yeah that's a great point grayson and you're right you know there definitely are risks that and

9:29more than people think and i like what you said there about sort of making making it easier in different ways for people to get involved in maybe ways that are less risky as well maybe there's just one-sided or just staking your tokens or somehow being able to get involved with having less risk is that is that something that you're interested

9:50in maybe the longer term with orca finding other ways for people to get involved into the decks yeah well we definitely want long term to have everyone be able to take advantage of what orca offers that is kind of the dream of a primitive and primitive is such like a technical term but ultimately what we want is to build something that's useful for people right

10:12whatever that looks like and for a lot of people they're already starting to get use on orca through these very like accessible move to earn like play to earn apps kind of like step in which integrate orca under the hood so they don't even know that they're using workout but they're getting value out of it right and i think in the future that could be extended to the liquidity

10:32provision side as well and do have some ideas here but i'm not ready to give them away just yet i love it and that's great to hear that you know there's there's daps and you know integrations of orca being used when people don't realize it i feel like that would be a good strategy for expanding out the awareness and just the growth of orca through not just

10:54people going there specifically but like partnerships and other kind of integrations definitely in that sense you know i was actually just kind of hanging out with some solana team members the other day and i think we actually have a somewhat similar strategy where in some cases especially with for example appealing to builders we want to get orca's name out

11:14there and make sure that people like know about orca as a brand because that's something we take very seriously as well in terms of like it's a brand that is a little bit playful it's professional but it's also very principled and has a lot of integrity and so it's important for people to know that they're building on orca but for end users it may not ultimately be that

11:34important for them to know that the technology that they're using is orca and so the two-sided marketplace is a really interesting game to play as a builder definitely and you mentioned just a short while ago about the orca tokens and how that sort of integrates into the decks as well i would love to know more on the orca token ecosystem and if

11:58there's other ways that creates a sustainable ecosystem for all the participants so orca does have a governance token the ticker the ticker's orca and yeah so it's actually you can use it right now in the brand new governance platform that we launched which we call it governance v0 because we consider it really a prototype the goal of putting that out there was just to start

12:23seeing what ideas the community had to start making moves towards a more community-led way of like gathering feedback and of also iterating on the decks itself but long term i'm actually really excited to push the boundaries a bit in terms of like what effective decentralized governance looks like and i think sometimes you know a lot of protocols can run the risk of

12:49in the rush to become like as decentralized as possible also become a little bit headless in terms of like lack of direction and so i'm really excited for the orca governance token to really serve as this method of aligning incentives between the community and developers and marketers etc all the folks who will contribute to the continued development

13:10of the protocol that's great grayson i like that approach and i completely agree you know my thesis on fully decentralized dows is really the co-founders and the core team who built the protocol you know they should sort of ease their way in slowly and not just give it away to the reins to the community who may not know exactly you know have the same

13:35vision in mind that the core team had built originally and so there's definitely a fine line to walk there in adding making bringing the community in giving feedback and making sure that it doesn't go totally haywire from you know what the original thesis was of the platform so that's great to hear now you know we talked a lot a lot about

14:00long-term vision different things there's so many different faucets of growth and expansion which is great for orca but i want to hone into the summer of 2022 and the rest of this year you know what are some of the major operational updates and roadmap points that you and your team want to get out for the end users on orca in the near future yeah so there's two major pieces both of

14:27which we've actually touched on already and so one is really making whirlpools the best possible liquidity layer on solana so the protocol is already out there we've recently open sourced our smart contract which is actually pretty i think a pretty big deal given that there aren't many sophisticated smart contracts out on solana that anyone can look at including ones

14:49that are double audited and so pretty happy for our community to learn from that but there's also improvements that we want to make to get whirlpools to what we consider like a true mvp so i think most likely that's going to include things like support for fee tiers a more sophisticated router and then of course the community listings project that we talked about which will

15:09allow whirlpools to be essentially this like long-term self-sustaining primitive and so that's kind of this first part is making whirlpools the best and most obvious choice for anyone who's wants to have a liquidity solution on solana and then the second piece is working on a more effective governance system so like the v0 that we've put out there is very

15:30intentionally minimal right it's basically like the solana provided realms ui and some discussion forums and so what we want to do is take what we learn from that to spend more time hearing from the community and then take a gradual approach to evolving it to something that allows basically orca to continue adapting and to gather these community contributions

15:53that will allow it to be sustaining far far out meanwhile i guess in the background where i'm still us doing on the sort of moonshot ideas but i think that's unlikely to take fruition in summer definitely very cool yeah i'm looking forward to just seeing how those updates come out and how the community can get involved and where for the most part are the

16:18community members gathering for orca and how can people get involved with that community yeah twitter and discord are definitely the most active places for orca so twitter obviously is where we put out all of our announcements i'm also pretty active on twitter myself so talking about ux talking about crypto so if you're interested in any of that feel

16:39free to come and follow us we are orca underscore so on twitter and i'm origa my i guess you could call it crypto moniker and over there i also post a lot of like op-eds talking about kind of defy in the future of that so something fun there discord is where our community is super active always sharing lots of ideas we have amazing community managers from all

17:01over the world who even run different language communities so it's something that we encourage folks from anywhere in the world to come and get involved in and then final plug again for our builders program so once again it's a grants program for anyone who wants to build some some protocol on top of whirlpools and we have actually a lot of ideas for folks who want to get started

17:23and build something meaningful on solana as well so all the information is available there on our dev portal at builders.orca.so incredible thank you so much grace great to hear that you're also just tapped in to d5 and posting about that and just growing the solana ecosystem all together i feel like both great additions and really just a green check for orca i will leave all

17:48those community links that you mentioned in the description box below as well and all the best with all the updates for orca that we talked about today and let's follow up in the near future ashen thank you so much super super fun to be here today